It's a Space Romance

taikonaut: Monument at the landing site of Valentina Tereshkova...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:43:20 +0100

Monument at the landing site of Valentina Tereshkova in Siberia, 53°N, 80°E

Soviet Art is the best Art.

The Atlantic

sagansense: Happy Birthday, Large Hadron Collider! May 7th...

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:51:12 +0100

Happy Birthday, Large Hadron Collider!

May 7th celebrates the anniversary of the first full powering-up of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, mankind’s greatest scientific experiment. Just what does it take to study particle acceleration on such a massive scale? TS Artist Tornado Studio has modeled the LHC, in an attempt to better convey all its working parts.

While the LHC will only be operating for part of 2013, we wish it a happy 5th birthday, and look forward to its next experiment in 2015.

via turbosquidinc

atomstargazer: APOD | 2013 June 4 | Orion Nebula in Oxygen,...

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:51:00 +0100

atomstargazer:

APOD | 2013 June 4 | Orion Nebula in Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Sulfur
Image Credit & Copyright: César Blanco González

Explanation: Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the above image are actually shock waves - fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The above image shows the nebula in three colors specifically emitted by hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur gas. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

fuckyeah-stars: Starry skies and bioluminescent phytoplankton...

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:50:10 +0100

fuckyeah-stars:

Starry skies and bioluminescent phytoplankton on the Maldives [x] [x]

scinerds: “Tiger Stripes” of Enceladus Pictured here is a...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:56:17 +0100

scinerds:

“Tiger Stripes” of Enceladus

Pictured here is a high resolution Cassini image of Enceladus from a close flyby.

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

Do underground oceans vent through the tiger stripes (in false-color blue) on Saturn’s moon Enceladus? The long features dubbed “tiger stripes” are known to spew ice from the moon’s icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon’s south pole and creating Saturn’s mysterious E-ring.

"I’m absolutely down for defending the first-class status of genre fiction that boldly goes where no..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:56:04 +0100

“I’m absolutely down for defending the first-class status of genre fiction that boldly goes where no or few stories have gone before. But if you think that working science fiction and fantasy relieves you of your obligations to coherent plotting and character behavior, or if it’s an engine to deliver free naked ladies, then you can stay in your mom’s basement, and off my bandwagon.”

- Alyssa Rosenberg, in Damon Lindelof’s Blithe Treatment Of ‘Star Trek’ Sexism And Why Genre Fiction Gets No Respect (via themarysue)

matthen: The creation of a fractal Brownian tree. Particles...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:13:34 +0100

matthen:

The creation of a fractal Brownian tree. Particles move around on random walks, but can become stuck starting at a seed in the centre. This creates intricate patterns similar to those created in certain chemical reactions and electric discharges. [more] [code]

astrodidact: Lightest Exoplanet Imaged So Far? A team of...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:11:40 +0100

astrodidact:

Lightest Exoplanet Imaged So Far?

A team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope has imaged a faint object moving near a bright star. With an estimated mass of four to five times that of Jupiter, it would be the least massive planet to be directly observed outside the Solar System. The discovery is an important contribution to our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

Although nearly a thousand exoplanets have been detected indirectly — most using the radial velocity or transit methods — and many more candidates await confirmation, only a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged. Nine years after ESO’s Very Large Telescope captured the first image of an exoplanet, the planetary companion to the brown dwarf 2M1207 (eso0428), the same team has caught on camera what is probably the lightest of these objects so far.

“Direct imaging of planets is an extremely challenging technique that requires the most advanced instruments, whether ground-based or in space,” says Julien Rameau (Institut de Planetologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, France), first author of the paper announcing the discovery. “Only a few planets have been directly observed so far, making every single discovery an important milestone on the road to understanding giant planets and how they form.”

In the new observations, the likely planet appears as a faint but clear dot close to the star HD 95086. A later observation also showed that it was slowly moving along with the star across the sky. This suggests that the object, which has been designated HD 95086 b, is in orbit around the star. Its brightness also indicates that it has a predicted mass of only four to five times that of Jupiter.

The team used NACO, the adaptive optics instrument mounted on one of the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). This instrument allows astronomers to remove most of the blurring effects of the atmosphere and obtain very sharp images. The observations were made using infrared light and a technique called differential imaging, which improves the contrast between the planet and dazzling host star.

The newly discovered planet orbits the young star HD 95086 at a distance of around 56 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, twice the Sun–Neptune distance. The star itself is a little more massive than the Sun and is surrounded by a debris disc. These properties allowed astronomers to identify it as an ideal candidate to harbour young massive planets. The whole system lies some 300 light-years away from us.

The youth of this star, just 10 to 17 million years, leads astronomers to believe that this new planet probably formed within the gaseous and dusty disc that surrounds the star. “Its current location raises questions about its formation process. It either grew by assembling the rocks that form the solid core and then slowly accumulated gas from the environment to form the heavy atmosphere, or started forming from a gaseous clump that arose from gravitational instabilities in the disc.” explains Anne-Marie Lagrange, another team member. “Interactions between the planet and the disc itself or with other planets may have also moved the planet from where it was born.”

Another team member, Gaël Chauvin, concludes, “The brightness of the star gives HD 95086 b an estimated surface temperature of about 700 degrees Celsius. This is cool enough for water vapour and possibly methane to exist in its atmosphere. It will be a great object to study with the forthcoming SPHERE instrument on the VLT. Maybe it can also reveal inner planets in the system — if they exist.

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1324/

therealmcgee: So I was talking to my friend about role reversal...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:30:06 +0100

therealmcgee:

So I was talking to my friend about role reversal and then this happened

astrodidact: Australia’s centre similar to Mars The dramatic...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:26:09 +0100

astrodidact:

Australia’s centre similar to Mars

The dramatic geological events that created opal, Australia’s national gemstone, have been described for the first time by a University of Sydney researcher.

The explanation underlines how the geology of Australia’s Red Centre is the most similar on Earth to the geology of Mars, to the extent it could yield valuable information on that planet for a fraction of the cost of a space mission.

“Australia produces over 90 percent of the world’s supply of opal. Before this we did not know its origin, why it forms at such shallow depths or why it can be found in central Australia and almost nowhere else on Earth,” said Associate Professor Patrice Rey, from the University’s School of Geosciences.

His findings have recently been published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences.

“The formation of Australian opal was due to an extraordinary episode of acidic weathering, during the drying out of the central Australian landscape,” said Associate Professor Rey.

This occurred when the Eromanga sea, a vast body of water covering 60 percent of Australia, extending from Coober Pedy to the Carpentaria Basin and across to Lightning Ridge, started retreating.

Between 100 million and 97 million years ago this sea came to cover a much smaller area. This meant the previously inundated central Australian landscape started drying out and acidic weathering happened on a massive scale when pyrite minerals released sulphuric acid.

Acidic weathering of the type that took place in Central Australia is unique on Earth at that scale, covering an estimated 1.3 million km2, but it has been described at the surface of Mars.

“The USA and the European community have invested billions of dollars to send orbiters and rovers to Mars in the hope of finding extra-terrestrial life but Central Australia offers a unique natural laboratory where potential Martian bio-geological processes could be studied.”

Notably, opaline silica, iron oxides and clay minerals similar to those found in central Australia were discovered at the surface of Mars in 2008, where they were interpreted as the product of acid weathering of volcanic debris covering the red planet.

“Many Australians familiar with the unmistakable features of Australia’s Red Centre may not realise, despite their similarly striking red appearance, that it shares many of its remarkable characteristics with Mars, which also appears to be why opaline silica forms there.”

To create the precious opal found in Australia, as opposed to opaline silica, demands a switch to alkaline conditions before silica-rich gel trapped in fractures and cavities dehydrates and solidifies. This is only possible when the host rock, as in Australia, has a large acid-neutralising capacity.

The opal discovery is personally satisfying for Associate Professor Rey who first encountered Australia as a schoolboy in France, through a 1970s documentary on opal mining in Coober Pedy. Thirty years later the Lightning Ridge Opal Miners Association reconnected Patrice with his childhood memory when they rang to ask him about researching the origin of opal.

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20130206-24440.html

weareallstarstuff: Flaming Star Nebula

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:25:07 +0100

weareallstarstuff:

Flaming Star Nebula

galaxyshmalaxy: triplet in draco (crop) (by Daniele Malleo)

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:24:07 +0100

galaxyshmalaxy:

triplet in draco (crop) (by Daniele Malleo)

124daisies: Sunday is a day off on the ISS. Karen spends hers...

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 19:23:06 +0100

124daisies:

Sunday is a day off on the ISS. Karen spends hers at the coffeeshop (Source)

magicalnaturetour: Aliens Landing by Wolongshan

Thu, 30 May 2013 08:45:10 +0100

magicalnaturetour:

Aliens Landing by Wolongshan

galaxyshmalaxy: IC4592 (by gvanhau)

Thu, 30 May 2013 07:32:33 +0100

galaxyshmalaxy:

IC4592 (by gvanhau)

"And here is what Leia does, when you force her into a scanty outfit and choke-chain: she takes that..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 07:31:12 +0100

“

And here is what Leia does, when you force her into a scanty outfit and choke-chain: she takes that chain, and she kills you with it. She doesn’t let her clothing get in her way or limit her more than she can help—she waits for her moment to strike, and then she conquers her would-be conqueror and saves the day.

And I was a little kid, not yet desensitized to violence […] Jabba’s death scene freaked the hell out of me. It wasn’t a clean blaster shot to the chest or a slice from a lightsaber that sent sparks flying or made you turn invisible. There were struggles, and flailing, and twitching limbs. The shots are close-ups, and very dark—it’s vicious, and vengeful, and physical, and very very personal.

So for me, wearing that gold bikini does not mean Here I am, a sexy toy for your amusement and gratification.

To me, that gold bikini says, If you fuck with me, I will end you.

”

- Olivia Waite - Ellora’s Cave author, inquisitive mind, and hedonist-about-town (via albinwonderland)

jtotheizzoe: Fast-Track to Orbit: Expedition 36/37 A Russian...

Wed, 29 May 2013 17:42:53 +0100

jtotheizzoe:

Fast-Track to Orbit: Expedition 36/37

A Russian Soyuz capsule launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Glorious Kazakhstan this afternoon, carrying U.S. astronaut (and space veteran/mechanical engineer) Karen Nyberg along with cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and Italian astronauta Luca Parmitano to their rendezvous with the ISS. They will spend a mere six hours catching up with the space station before they dock later tonight, a new pedal-to-the-metal path to orbit recently adopted by ISS-bound craft. In addition to lots and lots of science, the crew of six that will be aboard the ISS will take part in the Winter Olympic torch relay later this year.

Will Karen Nyberg entertain us like Chris Hadfield did with his gorgeous photos and video experiments (and his great Tumblr)? We’ll see. But word on the street is she’s more of a Pinterest fan.

Godspeed, Expedition 36/37. Here’s to six of you being great of behalf of seven billion of us.

P.S. - Howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com is correctly showing “6”, in case you’re wondering.

astrodidact: Detection of the cosmic gamma ray horizon:...

Mon, 27 May 2013 20:29:58 +0100

astrodidact:

Detection of the cosmic gamma ray horizon: Measures all the light in the universe since the Big Bang

(Phys.org) —How much light has been emitted by all galaxies since the cosmos began? After all, every photon (particle of light) from ultraviolet to far infrared wavelengths ever radiated by all galaxies that ever existed throughout cosmic history is still speeding through the Universe today. If we could carefully measure the number and energy (wavelength) of all those photons—not only at the present time, but also back in time—we might learn important secrets about the nature and evolution of the Universe, including how similar or different ancient galaxies were compared to the galaxies we see today.

That bath of ancient and young photons suffusing the Universe today is called the extragalactic background light (EBL). An accurate measurement of the EBL is as fundamental to cosmology as measuring the heat radiation left over from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background) at radio wavelengths. A new paper, called “Detection of the Cosmic γ-Ray Horizon from Multiwavelength Observations of Blazars,” by Alberto Dominguez and six coauthors, just published today by the Astrophysical Journal—based on observations spanning wavelengths from radio waves to very energetic gamma rays, obtained from several NASA spacecraft and several ground-based telescopes—describes the best measurement yet of the evolution of the EBL over the past 5 billion years.

Directly measuring the EBL by collecting its photons with a telescope, however, poses towering technical challenges—harder than trying to see the dim band of the Milky Way spanning the heavens at night from midtown Manhattan. Earth is inside a very bright galaxy with billions of stars and glowing gas. Indeed, Earth is inside a very bright solar system: sunlight scattered by all the dust in the plane of Earth’s orbit creates the zodiacal light radiating across the optical spectrum down to long-wavelength infrared. Therefore ground-based and space-based telescopes have not succeeded in reliably measuring the EBL directly.

So, astrophysicists developed an ingenious work-around method: measuring the EBL indirectly through measuring the attenuation of—that is, the absorption of—very high energy gamma rays from distant blazars. Blazars are supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies with brilliant jets directly pointed at us like a flashlight beam. Not all the high-energy gamma rays emitted by a blazar, however, make it all the way across billions of light-years to Earth; some strike a hapless EBL photon along the way. When a high-energy gamma ray photon from a blazar hits a much lower energy EBL photon, both are annihilated and produce two different particles: an electron and its antiparticle, a positron, which fly off into space and are never heard from again. Different energies of the highest-energy gamma rays are waylaid by different energies of EBL photons. Thus, measuring how much gamma rays of different energies are attenuated or weakened from blazars at different distances from Earth indirectly gives a measurement of how many EBL photons of different wavelengths exist along the line of sight from blazar to Earth over those different distances.

Observations of blazars by NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope spacecraft for the first time detected that gamma rays from distant blazars are indeed attenuated more than gamma rays from nearby blazars, a result announced on November 30, 2012, in a paper published in Science, as theoretically predicted.

Now, the big news—announced in today’s Astrophysical Journal paper—is that the evolution of the EBL over the past 5 billion years has been measured for the first time. That’s because looking farther out into the Universe corresponds to looking back in time. Thus, the gamma ray attenuation spectrum from farther distant blazars reveals how the EBL looked at earlier eras.

This was a multistep process. First, the coauthors compared the Fermi findings to intensity of X-rays from the same blazars measured by X-ray satellites Chandra, Swift, Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and XMM/Newton and lower-energy radiation measured by other spacecraft and ground-based observatories. From these measurements, Dominguez et al. were able to calculate the blazars’ original emitted, unattenuated gamma-ray brightnesses at different energies.

The coauthors then compared those calculations of unattenuated gamma-ray flux at different energies with direct measurements from special ground-based telescopes of the actual gamma-ray flux received at Earth from those same blazars. When a high-energy gamma ray from a blazar strikes air molecules in the upper regions of Earth’s atmosphere, it produces a cascade of charged subatomic particles. This cascade of particles travels faster than the speed of light in air (which is slower than the speed of light in a vacuum). This causes a visual analogue to a “sonic boom”: bursts of a special light called Čerenkov radiation. This Čerenkov radiation was detected by imaging atmospheric Čerenkov telescopes (IACTs), such as HESS (High Energy Stereoscopic System) in Namibia, MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Čerenkov) in the Canary Islands, and VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array Systems) in Arizona.

Comparing the calculations of the unattenuated gamma rays to actual measurements of the attenuation of gamma rays and X-rays from blazars at different distances allowed Dominquez et al. to quantify the evolution of the EBL—that is, to measure how the EBL changed over time as the Universe aged—out to about 5 billion years ago (corresponding to a redshift of about z = 0.5). “Five billion years ago is the maximum distance we are able to probe with our current technology,” Domínguez said. “Sure, there are blazars farther away, but we are not able to detect them because the high-energy gamma rays they are emitting are too attenuated by EBL when they get to us—so weakened that our instruments are not sensitive enough to detect them.” This measurement is the first statistically significant detection of the so-called “Cosmic Gamma Ray Horizon” as a function of gamma-ray energy. The Cosmic Gamma Ray Horizon is defined as the distance at which roughly one-third (or, more precisely, 1/e – that is, 1/2.718 – where e is the base of the natural logarithms) of the gamma rays of a particular energy have been attenuated.

This latest result confirms that the kinds of galaxies observed today are responsible for most of the EBL over all time. Moreover, it sets limits on possible contributions from many galaxies too faint to have been included in the galaxy surveys, or on possible contributions from hypothetical additional sources (such as the decay of hypothetical unknown elementary particles).

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-cosmic-gamma-ray-horizon-universe.html#jCp

inagumbubble: lacarpa: Sean Madden omg

Mon, 27 May 2013 20:29:14 +0100

inagumbubble:

lacarpa:

Sean Madden

omg

twistedsoup: discoverynews: UK to Send First Astronaut to...

Mon, 27 May 2013 20:28:34 +0100

twistedsoup:

discoverynews:

UK to Send First Astronaut to Space Station
Introducing Major Tim!

I am really looking forward to all the “There are some who call me… Tim” jokes. :D

I was enjoying the “Ground Control to Major Tim” jokes, bit then Hadfield won that round!